Chicago, IL
In the afternoon I drop Cherry off at the Chicago Auto Center, a family run garage I recently stumbled across less than a block from my new apartment. I’ve been talking to the son, Dmitri, who handles the customers. I get the impression the father is one of those Boyd Coddington crotchety types. Dmitri is a young guy, maybe early 20s, bright eyed and enthusiastic. I called ahead yesterday to describe what I need, so today when I come in and say, “I’d like my AC checked, it’s an old car…” he interrupts with “The ’66 Mustang?” and I like him immediately. Cherry has been running the old R12 coolant so we adapt the fittings and filled it with 134. Blows cold as ice he said. Hopefully he will get the brakes done too while he has the car out of commission.
Tomorrow I’ll go to the FedEx facility for my window regulator. Bad address—seems like every time I move I spend a month getting my Amazon or eBay or FedEx deliveries corrected so they don’t get sent to where I no longer live. I’m not very strong with that kind of administrative detail. (My sales associate buddies used to call it “administrivia” and it used to get to me. I once let an expense report sit for six months because any longer reimbursement would be refused and had accumulated $30K in expenses. CA was not happy that I let it sit for so long. Screw the bean counters, I rationalized: I’m busy saving the world with software.)
I locked myself out of my apartment—another regularly scheduled bit of bullshit I step into every time I move. I cannot remember a single place I’ve lived in where I haven’t locked myself out within the first month of moving. Absent mindedness I suppose. Ron, my new building engineer, took my call and gave me a few numbers for people in the building with access to spare keys. When I couldn’t locate anyone he drove over to the building after he left for the day to let me in. I hate to make my mystakes (sic) other people’s problems so I felt it was pretty standup of him to come down after work to let me back in.
Ron is pretty remarkable. He’s an older guy, the recovering hippie type, and a dyed in the wool Chicagoan. Being mechanical he’s a natural building engineer but his real knack is for outsider craft art. He makes robots from found objects, things he finds lying around. Some robots become sculptures, some are suits, some are actual walking, beeping robots. A couple of them are life size and scattered throughout the apartment complex. He told me the one by the front door was a special Halloween project where he designed the costume to impress one of the tenant’s children, maybe six years old, who saw him and deadpanned, “Is that Ron inside that robot?” (Very literal thinker there, kiddo.)
And when I say found objects I don’t think he’s too picky—he has an affinity for other people’s junk. The robot on my floor is made of plastic bottles, Christmas tree lights, heating duct work, a water cooler jug, bottle caps, and more drywall screws than I can do the math on. His office is packed to the gills with “raw material” of that sort: light fixtures, coffee cans, etc. I go to see him about the garage door remote and we fall to talking about his creative process (or more creativity in general, I’m always up for a recipe swap on creativity). Ron describes a recent mural done on free-standing window pane with bottle caps that outline the Bears’ wishbone-C logo, explaining how he had been in a rut for a few months when inspiration struck him and he twittered obsessively to get the piece done. He wasn’t commissioned and didn’t intend to sell it but he felt a consuming need, a passion, to invest his energy to this project and nail it down.
“Is that how you normally work, you know, in hyper-intense fits?” I ask.
“No, well yes, I guess it depends. See I don’t take commissions because my work is unpredictable and I don’t keep a schedule. I had one project where I took an old garage door opener, the remote like you have in your hand, and made a fifteen foot flag unfurl from a coffee can base. I built the thing inside my house—fifteen feet! It was huge! And so I brought it outside but couldn’t get the flag to unfold right. So I was going to put a spring on the end and when it reached the top it would *!POP!* like one of those toy guns. Well, I started, and I’d think about it, maybe get some parts, and before you know it’s been two years. Two years! So I said, ‘Ron you should finish this man.’”
“Is it done?”
“No. But that’s okay. That’s just how I work. Some people work on a deadline but that just doesn’t work for me. Hell, I usually don’t know what I’m going to make before I start. One of my favorite robots wound up looking like Marilyn Monroe. She was hot, blond, all that but when I started I couldn’t have told you how she would end up. Like if someone wanted me to make them an Elvis robot I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t know how. But if they like the robot that turned out like Elvis I’m happy to let them have it. Yeah, the Marilyn Monroe one…Marilyn Monrobot…someone bought that one.”
I laugh out loud at the name ‘Marilyn Monrobot’ because I love the wordplay and ask if he's done anything on commission. He says he's tried and it works better for everyone if he just makes what he makes and if they like it great, if not they can spend their money on art they like more.
That’s sage. The difference between the discretionary investment of emotional energy (being passionate about a piece of work), and the exchange of time for goods (the wage-labor cycle), is useful to keep straight if I hope to establish some kind of expectations about the meaningfulness of my work. I’m a huge proponent of the philosophy “love your work and get paid for it,” and while I recognize this isn’t always possible nevertheless it seems to me one of the most effective ways to create a coherent work/life structure. Ron figured out that art was his avocation, and keeping hallway walls painted and cigarette butts off the sidewalk is, for now, his vocation. Aah, but to unite the two without the feeling of selling out…who wouldn’t love that?
Seriously: would you not love to get rewarded handsomely for pursuing your passion and interest? Particularly if the work grew with you, as your interests changed the work changed to match.
I mention to Ron that writing can be inspired or not. I find my technical writing and consulting work to be a function of chair-time: I gotta have my ass in the chair in front of the screen to pound something out. Draft, revise, edit, edit, edit. Then start over from scratch. Chair-time. Stretches in solitude (or at a coffee house with the pretension of being "publically antisocial"). In my case, being extroverted doesn’t make the solitude of writing easy.
While I'm on the subject of building engineers, last week I ran into the engineer from my last apartment. His name is James, one of the neatest friendliest men I’ve ever met, a big black southern-drawling spirit with nothing but lady trouble. Sometimes he’d ask about my ex, sometimes about my job (“What’s it y’awl do zactly t’make yo’ money?”), mostly about my female visitors. I’d do the same. And when I locked myself out he conveniently forgot about the $35 entry fee. If there’s a lesson in this it is: the communal living dweller is well served to get to know the building engineer.
As I unpack today looking for my last box of kitchen pantry wares I dig through every single box in the apartment—twice—before I finally find it. Right next to the kitchen. Labeled “Kitchen Pantry.” I must been so preoccupied I had a negative hallucination because I looked at the box several times and it was obvious from the label what it was; perhaps I expected it to be buried somewhere and that drove me to search high and low. So I’m working on a comprehensive psychological theory of the psychology and economics of seeking and discovery that attempts to explain why it is that the thing one looks for is always in the last place one looks. It’s fairly intricate and there’s a great deal of abstract math, but here’s an outline (bear with me through the technical jargon):
Seriously, Durkheim doesn’t have dick on me.
In the evening I find myself looking forward to going out on the town with friends tonight and leaving the unpacking chaos behind to do some flirting and clubbing and dancing. I should probably put together a trip plan soon but tonight will not be the night for that.
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